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NZ Uni EMC broke considered ditching EMC before SNAFU

VNX fleet was almost out of warranty, RFI called for replacements

Oh, the irony: the New Zealand University that suffered a two-day brownout as a result of a problem with its EMC kit last month sought a possible replacement for the company's products.

A request for information titled Storage Systems Refresh explains that “The University’s existing VNX5700’s storage arrays are reaching the end of their warranty period” and that while the arrays are doing the job and probably will for a couple of years, the as in 2016 the educational institution will move to “containerised datacentres, a smaller storage footprint would be desirable.”

The University is open to cloud storage for its block and file needs, and for hyperconverged systems to replace the blocky VNX arrays supporting its VMware environment.

The RFI closed in mid-October and suggests a decision would be made by the end of that month.

The University has told The Register it's yet to make a decision about its new storage suppliers.

Whatever the outcome, the timing of the University's outage probably could not be any worse: if the Uni decides to ditch EMC, it won't be hard to see why it makes the decision. If it decides to stick with EMC, it can give the company's arm an almighty twist as the outage surely represents lovely leverage.

Hitachi Data Systems also has turf to defend: it provides arrays that hold 600 terabytes of data, growing at 15 per cent a year, and the University is keen on keeping those costs under control. ®

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